Frameworks for the Future
In this issue we present five more papers from prominent Australian geographers and their collaborators in our celebration of 50 years of Geographical Research.
Significant milestones like this incite not just reflection on achievement but also consideration of what the future holds. In this editorial we draw heavily on a presentation at a recent publishing workshop by Mr Philip Carpenter, a Wiley-Blackwell senior executive. Mr Carpenter explored scenarios for academic research publication in coming decades. He posited two axes of change. One involved changes to end-use behaviours and technologies. The other involved changes to the way content might be distributed.
Carpenter took as his starting point the existing control over research publishing by alliances of learned societies (such as the Institute of Australian Geographers) with global publishing houses (like John Wiley and Sons). One of Carpenter's scenarios showed how these alliances might continue to dominate research publishing alongside only incremental changes in the way material is published, distributed and used, with the societies – including their editors and teams of reviewers – retaining control over participation, content and quality, to a large extent.
If, however, research output was pressured – for example by government funding agencies – to become more accessible to a wider range of users then research content would need to change quite significantly. Information about the vulnerability of a native species, for example, might be delivered to a field officer in a compact package via an app and a mobile device. Similarly, research materials for undergraduate teaching might be made available by a publisher in customised learning packages. Put another way, in this scenario the 7500-word research article delivered under the masthead of a society's journal might not survive as the standard form of research output as funders and end-users demand more relevant, more accessible content.
In another scenario, market control over content by the societies and the oligopolistic publishing houses might collapse. Open-source journals and textbooks might proliferate. Governments could mandate free access to the findings of the research they fund. A wider range of products might become available for teaching and referencing via some sort of low-cost, i-tunes delivery model. The rich revenue base for journals that comes from library subscriptions world-wide would be threatened.
Then if these two latter scenarios are combined – delivery technologies becoming more flexible and mobile; and content increasingly stylised and packaged to match user demand – then traditional research practices and outputs could change dramatically. Carpenter speculated on a research community that could be much more participatory, with data sets being built and shared more widely; research teams becoming active in real time across vast distances; new types of research communities challenging the societies' ownership of quality and content; new forms of commercialisation capable of delivering substantial payments to those small number of researchers who generate high-demand content; and user-pays quality control and reviewing agencies that supersede voluntary editors and peer-reviewers struggling under institutional work pressures.
Philip Carpenter's speculations are arresting. Certainly there have been changes to our journal over the last 50 years, but the basic task of the editors – collecting manuscripts, distributing them to peers for refereeing, and supervising revisions – has changed very little, although vastly less than the changes that the next 50 years will bring.
The five special articles in this issue raise many concerns about our research and dissemination practices in one way or another. Jim Walmsley wonders why geographers, especially human geographers, are not more prominent in public debate especially given their quality contributions to understanding the nature of contemporary social change. Walmsley's pleas are that we engage with a wider audience, that we nurture public intellectuals capable of popularising our discipline, and that we re-invigorate place as a framework at the forefront of the social sciences. Walmsley's is an important essay, eclectic in many ways, but demonstrative of the value of considered analysis and exposition. The article makes the editors wonder why we receive and publish so few essays. Perhaps it is the dominance of empiricism and the particularly rigid language format that accompanies it in our discipline.
Jane Jacobs, Stephen Cairns and Ignaz Strebel are concerned to push the boundaries of geography's traditional approach to both theorisation and empiricism. On one hand they question the ontology of there being a stable material form which we know as a building. They want a building – in their case high rise apartment buildings in Glasgow and Singapore – to be seen as made and shaped not just by architects and builders but by occupants, workers, and lingerers of all sorts, even rodents and moulds. They also want to capture the ‘eventfulness’ of their buildings in ways beyond the usual ‘palette’ of multi-methods especially by exploratory ethnographic and visual-capture methods, and in ways that can mine the inherently interdisciplinary nature of their work.
Similarly, Lesley Head's exploration of the way the idea of ‘biotic nativeness’ drives environmental perceptions and management practices shows the ongoing importance of understanding how we frame our research and inquiry. Fittingly for a volume 50 celebratory contribution, Head points to an article in the journal's 5th volume (1967) by Nigel Wace, a biogeographer, then from the University of Adelaide. Wace wrote about the role (and power) of biogeography's categories in constructing research activity including in defining what were held to be native communities of vegetation. An obituary for Wace (Holdgate 2005) recounts his fun in asking his friends, ‘Do you think there were weeds in the Garden of Eden?’ Head's article is a powerful exercise in erasing and stretching the spatial and temporal boundaries of the idea of native vegetation, with important implications for how we manage the Australian environment.
Our frameworks for thinking and for guiding data collection and analysis are similarly exposed in Andrew Short's article about the development from the 1970s of a morphodynamics approach to coastal geomorphology in Australia. Like Lesley Head, Short traces the evolution of particular views of the Australian continent via an exposition of categories and their placement within particular spatial and temporal boundaries. And, like Jacobs et al., Short wants more from geography than straight-forward descriptions of material form and its stability through time. At the heart of the morphodynamics approach, says Short, is the inseparability of scale, materiality and form in the beach environment and their roles in producing the processes of beach formation. Material in the beach environment is more than an idle surface upon which beach processes simply expel their energy.
Michael Webber's empirical concern is the gigantic Three Gorges dam across the Changjiang River in central China. Like the other authors, a sub-text of Webber's article is the question of the appropriateness of various categories to understand what Webber sees as a worrying environmental and social project. These categories include neoliberalism, modernisation and capitalism. While lending important insights, Webber finds that these categories do not sufficiently enrol key political and historical events, individual actors, and even happenstance, as major influences in the motivation and design of the dam. Real life and politics always overfill our categories of analysis, however longstanding.
We trust you will enjoy and appreciate these contributions to the second of four issues that celebrate the 50th volume of our journal.
